Saturday, May 28, 2016

Moscow Said Deploying Russian Criminal World against Ukraine

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 28 – Many are now
being distracted by the Kremlin’s charm offensive, but Moscow continues its
hybrid war against Ukraine; and one of the most dangerous “fronts” in this conflict,
a senior Ukrainian police official warns, involves Moscow’s deployment of senior Russian
professional criminals to Ukraine to destabilize that country.

Among the professional criminals now
operating in Ukraine are “citizens not only of Ukraine but also of Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Armenia and most of all the Russian Federation,” Troyan says, with most
of them having the status of “thieves in law” in Russia and being “under the
influence of the Russian special services.”

The purpose of such
Moscow-controlled professional criminals in Ukraine is “to collect information
and destabilize the criminal situation in the regions of Ukraine.” One of the reasons
it is hard to root out such people is that they enjoy the protection of Russian
officials and some in the media and have their own counter-intelligence
operations.

These professional criminals are
especially active in and can even be said to have their home bases in those
portions of Ukraine occupied by Russia and not controlled by Kyiv, the police
official says. And they are often used to promote “the economic interests of oligarchic
and monopolistic capital” against the country and to steal and then export
Ukraine’s national wealth.

Troyan was driven to make this
report, his arguments make clear, by the fact that on May 17, the Verkhovna
Rada did not pass a measure he had promoted that would have given a legal
definition to “thieves in law” and thus improved the ability of the police to
act against those who direct criminal activity but often at sufficient remove
that they can’t be linked to specific crimes.